


Wonderland, Soft-Boiled

by blue_fjords



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Character Study, Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-03
Updated: 2012-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-30 13:04:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_fjords/pseuds/blue_fjords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen, post-<i>To the Last Man</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wonderland, Soft-Boiled

Owen puts on his jacket and shoves his hands in his pockets. His fingers catalog everything in his pockets, a nervous habit he’s had forever, even before Katie had pressed a book into his hands and told him to read it; _he’d love it_. Well, he hadn’t loved it, but he had recognized something in it on a fundamental level. So as his fingers play over condoms, candy and loose change, he takes up the soothing count: three condoms, five sticks of gum from three different packs, one lolly and two pounds in change. He’s a real threat to society with these pockets. He turns the collar of his jacket up and follows Tosh at a distance. _Tosh would be a threat to society with these pockets. She’d be a threat with a fucking paperclip._

Tosh leans on the railing and looks out over Tiger Bay. She’s taken to coming here lately, Owen’s noticed. Three times in the three days since Tommy went back in time and died a coward’s death. He leans casually on the railing next to her. Owen counts the contents of his pockets five more times in various combinations before she opens her mouth.

“Do you think they’re waiting?”

In his pocket, Owen rubs the packaging around one of the condoms. “Those birds?” he answers flippantly, indicating a group of middle-aged women farther down the walkway. “I think they’ve realized it’s not going to happen.”

Tosh doesn’t crack a smile. “You know what I mean, Owen.” Her voice is only moderately reproachful.

He sighs noisily. “I’m not really one for Heaven and angels playing harps, Tosh,” he hedges, fingering the lolly.

“Forget about the angels. Do you think we’ll see them again?” Tosh’s voice is forceful, but not harsh. Owen watches her as he debates his answer, noting the way her shoulders are unbent, the way she ignores the wind pulling at her hair, the way she stares forward, clear-eyed. Tosh in adversity is so much stronger than him.

“Maybe we will,” he says finally. “Or maybe we won’t like it there, and we’ll take them away with us,” he adds, picturing a high-walled Heaven that runs smoothly and elegantly. Sounds like Hell. And Katie had always wanted to go on safari, no walls for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers and always something new.

Out over the bay, a couple of seagulls are having a noisy argument, full of caws and clacks. Tosh smiles. “You’re assuming we’ll be there together.”

“Well, why not?” he grumbles. “You have my back all the time.” He rolls a coin over his knuckles and shifts his feet. The conversation has grown too sentimental for his taste. Tosh seems to pick up on it, and she says nothing in reply, just smiles again. It’s good to see her smile.

He gives her the lolly. It’s a poor substitute for everything he owes her, but it’s been so long since he was last generous, and Tosh has never been greedy.

***

He’s out with Ianto later that night, a rare occurrence now that Jack is back. Jack takes up a lot of space, but tonight he is contained by the Hub and Owen and Ianto are not. The pub is crowded, about a dozen birds dominating the far corner to celebrate a birthday. A dark-haired beauty flashes him a smile, ignoring Ianto, and Owen preens and gives her a rather shifty-eyed grin in response. It’s possible he’s had too much to drink, or she looks too much like Diane, but he can suddenly feel the alcohol gurgling back up his throat.

Ianto gets him out back to the alley before he horks. “Fuck. It fucking smells like the innards of a Gastrian pigdog back here.”

Ianto gives him a grim smile, and Owen notices a fleck or two of vomit on Ianto’s nice shoes. At least, he thinks they’re nice. They require polish, at any rate. Ianto wordlessly hands him a handkerchief.  
Owen dabs at his mouth. He’s already feeling hungry again. Maybe for a curry. Anything out of this alley and the light rain. He’s about to suggest it when Ianto’s comm link blips. _Jack._

Ianto answers with a curve of his lips, a frequent occurrence now that Jack is back. Owen smirks at him and makes an obscene gesture with his hands, and Ianto turns away, rolling his eyes.

Owen doesn’t see the young man, but suddenly he’s there, and the streetlamp reflects off the bared blade in his hand, the wild drug-fogged eyes peering out of a pinched face. Owen’s mind freezes, then boils over; all the impotent rage of a smaller child confronted with a bully bubbling to the top. He moves quickly, shoving Ianto aside and stepping into the attacker’s space. Instep, kneecap, hands rising to shake the knife from his grasp. His opponent goes down with a cry, but Owen’s heart skips a beat when he hears it echoed behind him. Ianto has disarmed the second one, the one Owen never even saw, but he’s leaning back up against the brick wall of the pub, and there’s blood.

His training kicks in with a snap, burning through the alcohol haze. He transfers the comm link to his own ear and barks instructions, even as he helps Ianto to the ground as his legs give out. How many times has he knelt over this same man, holding his guts in with his bare hands? The memories tickle at his brain, just out of reach. Ianto’s skin is so white, that shade that’s unique to the British Isles and its generations of sparse sunlight, and Owen presses hard against that kinship, rich red blood welling between his fingers. Jack’s voice is in his ear, riding an edge of panic.

The hours pass in a blur of rain and coppers and emergency personnel, an ambulance ride and Jack’s blue eyes meeting his dark ones over a sea of doctors. Ianto isn’t in surgery for very long but Owen feels stone-cold sober by the time he and Jack are ushered over to his bed. Ianto is groggy from the pain and morphine. Owen surveys the chart at the foot of his bed, reassuring himself of the superficiality of Ianto’s knife wound. Ianto makes a lame joke about the scar he’ll have, and Jack’s face crumbles. Owen turns away as Jack carefully, so very carefully pulls Ianto to his chest, kisses his forehead, eyelids, nose; murmurs something he’s not supposed to hear.

This intimacy is unexpected, the relief etching Jack’s face raw and unnerving. He catches the expression on Ianto’s face as he moves away. Ianto’s eyes are wide with awe at Jack’s reaction, and it calls up memories that hit Owen like a suckerpunch to the gut: Katie’s face after her first doctor’s visit, when they didn’t know the alien in her brain was an alien at all; Diane’s face as she ran her fingers over her plane. He pats Ianto awkwardly on the foot and Ianto raises a finger in salute before he leaves.

A whisper of “thanks, mate” follows him into the hall.

***

Owen’s down in the med bay very early the next morning, dissecting a red boar-like alien. It came through the Rift dead, and Owen’s wants to know just what it is about Earth that led to its demise. He frowns as he surveys the stomach contents. _Or maybe Earth is just an elaborate graveyard,_ he thinks.

Jack clatters down the stairs to join him, rubbing a hand through his shower-fresh hair. Tosh has taken Jack’s place at Ianto’s bedside for a few hours, and Owen saw Gwen down at the police station when he finished up his interview, no doubt haranguing her former partner about the attack.

Jack leans over his shoulder, wrinkling his nose at the smell of Kastra stomach. “Looks like he liked rocks,” he notes.

Owen makes a noncommittal noise.

Jack leans back against the wall, shoving his hands in his pockets. “So...good work last night, Owen.”

Owen grimaces. He’s been playing it over and over in his head. If he hadn’t immediately leapt in, if he had properly surveyed the situation, that second one would never have got past him. He spears one of the rocks with a scalpel, and the tool breaks.

Jack raises his eyebrows. “Ianto can take care of himself, you know that, right?”

_Says the man who clung to him like a little lost puppy last night._ “We went hunting together a lot. Before,” he says instead, trying for nonchalance, but not too hard.

Jack smiles a tad wistfully. “Wish I’d seen that.”

Owen grunts his agreement, and fishes inside the Kastra for a kidney. It looks like a human kidney, only about three times the size and lurid yellow. Jack is watching him from his stance by the wall, and Owen catches himself swaggering a little at the attention, much to his annoyance. 

“Make yourself useful and hand me another scalpel,” he mutters.

Jack pushes back from the wall and gets him the sharpest one he has. They both lean over the kidney as Owen slices through one, two, three scaly layers. He spreads the bisected kidney as flat as it will go, blue-black inky liquid filling the tray.

“Huh,” Owen breathes. “You know, Jack, I have a feeling this is not, in fact, a kidney, but a lung.”

Jack’s eyes lift to his face. “And what makes you think that?”

Owen uses his scalpel to point to the designs along the organ’s interior wall. “It tried to process oxygen, and could not. Look at this ridge here,” and Jack cranes his neck to follow the movement of his finger, “it’s a reaction to our atmosphere.”

“So the Kastra died upon arrival,” Jack muses. “Tragic.”

Owen shoots him a sharp glance. Jack means it. “What do you know about these things, Jack?”

“Peaceful. The intelligence of a three year old human child, actually.”

Owen looks back down at the alien, the matted red fur, the incongruously floppy ears, and imagines it sitting up and talking about football and sweets in a child’s high voice. He and Katie could have had a three year old by now. A fleck of dirt gets in his eye, and he blinks it out. Jack touches his arm. “I’m going to check back in at the hospital now.”

Owen nods, and draws a sheet up over the Kastra. “Don’t baby him, Jack. He’ll resent you for it.”

“Trust me, Owen,” Jack calls back over his shoulder, “I most certainly do not think of Ianto as a baby.”

He gives a salacious waggle of his eyebrows, and Owen can’t help but grin even as he rolls his eyes.

***

Gwen stomps into the Hub around noon, bearing sandwiches and crisps and a foul mood. Tosh looks up from her monitor and accepts her food with a distracted smile, leaving Owen alone to handle the wrath of Gwen.

“I take it your copper friend Shaggy wasn’t of much use?” he asks, surveying the remaining two sandwiches. She got him extra mustard, perfect.

“It was stupid,” she sighs. “I was in his position for _years_. I _know_ the inspector will do a good job with this case; I _know_ there’ll be a trial and conviction and prison. But I still went down to the station and got in their faces to make them do it, I don’t know, faster, harder. As if I was more important than everyone else.” She takes a vicious bite of her sandwich and chews pensively.

A drop of mustard falls on Owen’s lab coat and he licks it off. “We _are_ more important than everyone else,” he says with a sardonic wave of his sandwich.

Gwen eyes him askance. “Sometimes I can’t tell when you’re serious.”

Owen smirks back at her, and continues with his mouth full. “All right then, Gwen, you need a way to be proactive? You can help me and Tosh on a little project.”

Gwen pauses. “Dare I ask what the two of you are up to?”

“Crime-fighting.” He chews slowly and watches her face. Gwen has such an expressive face. It’s one of the things that first drew him to her; her inability to hide her joy.

She laughs delightedly now. “Oh my God, Owen, what did you _do_?”

Owen shrugs and rips open a bag of crisps. “Your Heddlu,” he ignores Gwen’s wrinkled nose at his mispronunciation, “already has the suspects in hand for our case. But it was raining last night, yeah, and the crime scene’s fucked. So what is the police to do in such an instance, if they don’t have two _expert_ eyewitnesses like us? Rely on CCTV. And,” he takes a large bite of his sandwich, “I just met their chief analyst this morning. Trust me, they need a software upgrade. See?” He swallows and gestures over to Tosh’s monitor, and they watch a grainy still photo from the night before resolve into a clear picture of one of the attackers.

“You’ve been working on a software upgrade for the Cardiff police?” Gwen asks incredulously.

“Well, Tosh has been doing the actual work. But it _was_ my idea.”

Gwen frowns a little and opens her mouth, but Owen holds his hand up to stop her. “Before you say anything, we won’t contaminate our case by butting in now and creating a conflict of interest. But for everyone who’s not as important as us…”

Gwen starts to laugh, and is still smiling when her mobile rings. “It’s Andy! Thanks, Owen.” She squeezes his shoulder before rising to answer the call. He can hear the excited note in her voice.

It’s the longest conversation they’ve had in months; since the two of them imploded, really. Gwen’s a lot of fun (most of the time) and he enjoys the friction in their working relationship (usually), but there’s a definite coolness there that set in before Jack left them. Depending on each other has only thawed it partly.

Still, he muses as he chomps on his pickle, ‘friendship’ or no, it’s easier to deal with Gwen when it’s him who’s made her happy.

***

Owen leaves the Hub early that evening. He’s dead tired, and he still has to go to the hospital and transfer Ianto over to his supervision before he can even think about heading out to a pub and finding a use for one of the condoms (still at three) in his jacket pocket. He places one of the sticks of gum (now down to two) on his tongue and lets the flavor sit there for a moment, cinnamon and spicy. The sun is setting out over the bay when he makes it up to the Plass. A seagull flaps its wings, passing in front of the sun, outlined in fire. It looks like Myfanwy for a moment.

When he was a small boy, his mother used to obsess about the end of the world, Death coming in the form of a fiery comet. _Or perhaps a burning sun carried on the wings of an extinct dinosaur_ , he thinks now. His shadow stretches out long behind him as he crosses over to the railing, making him a giant. Waves lap at the pier, creating a song he has never had the patience to hear. Maybe he will someday, before the end of the world. 

Tosh joins him silently, unannounced, and proffers a bag of sweets. He helps himself liberally to the bag; multi-flavored sugar crunching between his jaws, warring with his gum. If he looks out of the corner of his eye, Owen can see her shadow behind them, too, and at this angle, the two shadows look like co-conspirators. She doesn’t say anything this time, and Owen is content to stand there in relative quiet as the sun completes its circuit through their patch of sky.

The light is fading fast when he claps his hands together and clears his throat. “So! Excellent work today, Tosh! Same again tomorrow, yeah?”

Tosh nods. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m going to stay here for just a bit longer, though.”

Owen grunts. “Well, I’m off. See you later, Tosh.”

His fingers are back in his pockets, sorting coins. A snatch of a song skitters across his consciousness, and he pauses, halfway across the Plass. “ _I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow; I met one man who was wounded in love_.” 

Tosh turns when he calls her name, and even from the distance, he can see her smile when he waves and yells “good night.” 

The sun falls beneath the waves, and darkness sets in. But the streetlamps come on as he continues, and there is just enough light to be getting by.

**Author's Note:**

> Owes a debt of inspiration to Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Song lyrics are from Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Special thanks to verasteine for the mighty beta and the tutorial in “Law & Order: Cardiff.” Thanks also to my British spouse, smirnoffmule, for the very British advice.  
> Originally posted in June of 2009.


End file.
